DAC is coming, next week, in beautiful downtown Austin at the Convention Center. I’ll be there Monday and Tuesday, running around the exhibit area. If you haven’t yet got your plane and hotel tickets, drop everything and start looking. I’m guessing this will be as popular as it always is, especially given the venue. I know of multiple… Read More
Tag: bernard murphy
Visual Quality
A few years ago, I started looking at data visualization methods as a way to make sense of large quantities of complex data. This is a technique that has become very popular in big data analytics where it is effectively impossible to see patterns in data in any other way. There are vast numbers of different types of diagram – treemap,… Read More
Simplifying Requirements Tracing
Requirements traceability is a necessary part of any top-down system specification and design when safety or criticality expectations depend on tightly-defined requirements for subsystems. Traceability in this context means being able to trace from initial documented requirements down through specification and datasheet… Read More
Active Voice
Voice activated control, search, entertainment and other capabilities are building momentum rapidly. This seems inevitable – short of Elon Musk’s direct brain links, the fastest path to communicate intent to a machine is through methods natural to us humans: speech and gestures. And since for most of us speech is a richer… Read More
Webinar: How RTL Design Restructuring Helps Meet PPA
To paraphrase an Austen line, it is a truth universally acknowledged that implementation, power intent and design hierarchy don’t always align very well. Hierarchy is an artifact of legacy structure, reuse and division of labor, perhaps well-structured piecewise for other designs but not necessarily so for the design you now… Read More
An InFormal Chat
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as the saying goes. Which is all very well when the purpose is entertainment or serving the arcane skills of a select priesthood, but it’s not a good way to grow a market. Then you want to dispel the magic aura, make the basic mechanics more accessible to a wider… Read More
Margin Call
A year ago, I wrote about Ansys’ intro of Big Data methods into the world of power integrity analysis. The motivation behind this advance was introduced in another blog, questioning how far margin-based approaches to complex multi-dimensional analyses could go. An accurate analysis of power integrity in a complex chip should… Read More
Getting to IP Functional Signoff
In the early days of IP reuse and platform-based design there was a widely-shared vision of in-house IP development teams churning out libraries of reusable IP, which could then be leveraged in many different SoC applications. This vision was enthusiastically pursued for a while; this is what drove reusability standards and … Read More
RTL Correct by Construction
Themes in EDA come in waves and a popular theme from time to time is RTL signoff. That’s a tricky concept; you can’t signoff RTL in the sense of never having to go back and change the RTL. But the intent is still valuable – to get the top-level or subsystem-level RTL as well tested as possible, together with collateral data (SDC, UPF, etc)… Read More
Consolidation and Design Data Management
Consensia, a Dassault Systemès channel partner, recently hosted a webinar on DesignSync, a long-standing pillar of many industry design flows (count ARM, Qualcomm, Cavium and NXP among their users). A motivation for this webinar was the impact semiconductor consolidation has had on the complexity of design data management,… Read More